In March 1953, at the height of the Cold War, with the Rosenbergs awaiting electrocution, Senator Joe McCarthy investigated the presence of certain books in State Department-sponsored overseas libraries. One writer whose books the libraries stocked was William Mandel, United Press expert on the WW2-era Soviet Union. Roy Cohen, David Schine and McCarthy's other staff named Mandel as a member of the Communist Party. Televised throughout the U.S. and watched by 40 million viewers, Mandel's defiance of the powerful Senator was unprecedented. Here is a 30-minute preview of a film about the McCarthy-Mandel confrontation. Mandel's reasonable-toned rejoinders of senators' questions permits little entry-point for senatorial bullying and he goes on to give a fairly cogent reply to McCarthyism.
Friday, January 08, 2010
purging libraries
In March 1953, at the height of the Cold War, with the Rosenbergs awaiting electrocution, Senator Joe McCarthy investigated the presence of certain books in State Department-sponsored overseas libraries. One writer whose books the libraries stocked was William Mandel, United Press expert on the WW2-era Soviet Union. Roy Cohen, David Schine and McCarthy's other staff named Mandel as a member of the Communist Party. Televised throughout the U.S. and watched by 40 million viewers, Mandel's defiance of the powerful Senator was unprecedented. Here is a 30-minute preview of a film about the McCarthy-Mandel confrontation. Mandel's reasonable-toned rejoinders of senators' questions permits little entry-point for senatorial bullying and he goes on to give a fairly cogent reply to McCarthyism.
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
